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Friends Fear for Radio Reporter Still Missing in Chechnya

Friends and colleagues of a Russian reporter for the American-funded Radio Liberty have been making increasingly frantic appeals for information about him five days after Russia announced that it had handed him over to Chechen rebels.

They say they are increasingly dissatisfied with the government's handling of the case and doubtful about whether they are being told the truth.

The reporter, Andrei Babitsky, was last heard from Jan. 15, when he called the Moscow bureau of Radio Liberty to say he was heading out of Grozny, the Chechen capital, as Russian forces pounded it into heaps of rubble and twisted metal.

The next day, Mr. Babitsky, 35, a veteran Russian combat correspondent who spent much of the war reporting from behind Chechen lines, was detained by federal forces. On Feb. 3, the Russian authorities contend, he was exchanged -- allegedly at his own request -- for Russian soldiers held prisoner by the Chechens. But no news of him has emerged since then. ''Our feeling is that for a guy with as much experience as Andrei, if he could have, he would have reached us by now,'' said Jeff Trimble, director of broadcasting for Radio Liberty.

Looking weary and unshorn, Mr. Babitsky appeared last weekend on Russian television screens in a choppy video said to have been made by Russian security services on a muddy road somewhere in Chechnya on Feb. 3. In a closing shot, Mr. Babitsky, his back to the camera, is escorted away, his arm held in a tight grip by a burly man in a black mask, not the usual attire of Chechnya's field commanders.

Since then, silence. Or at least, silence on Mr. Babitsky's part. Various branches of the Russian government keep issuing bits of information, insisting that Mr. Babitsky is alive and that he is no longer their responsibility.

On the Chechen side, a series of spokesmen, including Aslan Maskhadov, the Chechen leader, have said that Mr. Babitsky is not being held anywhere in Chechnya and that they know nothing about any exchange.

Mr. Babitsky's wife, Lyudmila, interviewed Monday night on national television, bit her lip as she described watching the video ''150 times,'' examining it for details about her husband's physical and mental state.

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''It is not clear what is happening to him,'' she said, fighting back tears, as her interviewer ended the program, on a privately owned station, with a somber plea to the Russian authorities to come forward with the truth.

Today, Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo said that Mr. Babitsky was ''safe and sound'' and that his swap had been arranged by Interior Ministry agents and sanctioned by the prosecutor general's office.

But Mr. Babitsky's colleagues see ominous signs in the handling of his case. ''Imagine a state that takes its own citizen and delivers him to the hands of armed men in masks,'' said Savik Shuster, the Moscow bureau chief of Radio Liberty, interviewed on television. ''What kind of a state is that?''

Mr. Babitsky, a human rights activist who joined Radio Liberty 10 years ago, is well known to reporters who have covered both wars in Chechnya for his fearless travels through a dangerous region, sometimes with security provided by Chechen field commanders.

To the Russian military, which has tried to keep strict control over reporters' access to the fighting in Chechnya, he was a bete noire, whose reporting often flew in the face of the official version of events.

One of Mr. Babitsky's lawyers, Genri Reznik, said today that he was ready to charge the Russian authorities with violating Mr. Babitsky's rights during his detention. For the first 10 days no one was even informed that he had been detained, and even after that, he was denied the right to telephone his family or his lawyers, Mr. Reznik said.

Mr. Shuster said another Radio Liberty correspondent reported hearing from the mother of a prisoner held in the same cell that Mr. Babitsky had been beaten and forced to sing loudly and for a long time.

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A version of this article appears in print on February 9, 2000, on Page A00004 of the National edition with the headline: Friends Fear for Radio Reporter Still Missing in Chechnya. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe